As if we needed it, the evidence that human brains don’t mature until our early 20s continues to mount as reported by NPR:
Impulsive children become thoughtful adults only after years of improvements to the brain’s information highways, a team reports in Current Biology.
A study of nearly 900 young people ages 8 to 22 found that the ability to control impulses, stay on task and make good decisions increased steadily over that span as the brain remodeled its information pathways to become more efficient.
The finding helps explain why these abilities, known collectively as executive function, take so long to develop fully, says Danielle Bassett, an author of the study and an associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
“A child’s ability to run or to see is very well developed by the time they’re 8,” she says. “However, their ability to inhibit inappropriate responses is not something that’s well developed until well into the 20s.”
Consider that in reference to the 26th Amendment.
Consider that in reference to the 26th Amendment.
A good point, though if we were to have a minimal standard for reasoning ability and executive functions for voting rights, we’d disenfranchise an awful lot of people.
The issue isn’t reasoning ability. It’s the likelihood of judgment being overwhelmed by impulse.
Yes I realized I was conflating things mid comment and tried to modify by adding in executive functions but should have rewritten the whole comment.
We needed a study to confirm this?
Steve
“We needed a study to confirm this?”
Kinda makes you wonder who funded it – Parents trying to get their twenty-something kids to move out?
But yeah, that was me definitely. I don’t think I was fully cognitive until about 30. I’m so thankful I didn’t marry young, I would have been a terrible husband.
And me. I was a university student in my teens (engineering) and again when I was in my 50’s (anthropology). In some ways, the environments were quite similar, but my behavior was different (Thank God!). More to the point, my reasoning was quite different.
That my politics had changed between Boston in the 1960;s and Los Angeles in the 1990’s was a minor issue. I looked for strains of logic in the materials I was reading much more earnestly than I had as a youth, I took it as a matter of course that, say, reading four different authors on the archaeological remains of French Neanderthals would give me a more rounded perspective than reading one author. I found much to appreciate when listening to presentations by fellow students who — candidly — were not always as bright and diligent as I thought myself to be; I came to feel that my own presentations were successful when my fellow students listened and nodded attentively, rather than when my professors gave me good grades. .I took art history and French and anatomy and geography courses with the intent of widening my horizons.
Let me create an analogy by viewing my mind as an ocean — the waters, alas~! do not run so swiftly or raise such exciting waves as they did in my youth, but the expanse has increased so much with time, and what was once shallow now harbors incomprehensible depths. I’ll not insist that Age has given me Wisdom, but how about Maturity?
I shake in wonder how life worked before 1940, when adulthood often started at 15.
Perhaps the mind matures faster if certain stresses occurred, probably with a higher risk of mental breakdown?
Physical maturity was all that was needed for most jobs. Credential requirements notwithstanding that’s still largely the case.
Additionally, in extended families even adults who were married were frequently subordinate to family elders. My dad’s family, Swiss to the core, was an extreme case of that. My grandfather and his brothers worked for my great-grandfather as long as he was alive. My great-grandfather didn’t pay them a wage—he gave them an allowance and paid their bills.